Category Archives: Science & Technology

Something we want and couldn’t have before

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A thoughtful essay on “content” and publishing by Paul Graham

“I don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but I’m not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.”

“When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.”

Emphasis mine.

Websites: Fast, easy, inexpensive

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A couple of weeks ago I got a call from one of the guys in our Minnesota office. He wanted a website to serve the advertisers of one of our networks. Said he didn’t really have a budget and he’d like to have it by the first home game, to be played in a brand new stadium (just over a week away). They were going to have lots of photos and didn’t have a good way to share them with fans and sponsors.

I purchased a WordPress theme (from Studio Press) for $65 and paid another hundred or so to have it customized (thank you, Rebecca). Ten days later the site was up and running (still adding content, obviously).

I’ve been at this long enough to be amazed that I could give the guy a credible website for $200 in a week-and-a-half. AND because it’s WordPress, he –or one of his interns– can update this site thorughout the season. I remember when this would have taken months and cost thousands of dollars.

Gnomedex 9.0

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In a few days I make my annual pilgrimage to Seattle for Gnomedex (“a technology conference of inspiration and influence”). This is the only conference I attend and it’s important enough that I pay my expenses when necessary. I consider it a valuable investment (and tax deduction).

It’s a very small conference. Maybe 300 people? Brief bios of this year’s speakers give you some idea of the eclectic nature of Gnomedex. Here’s how one hoary attendee described the event:

“Every year I come back from Gnomedex with a sense of perspective. A better understanding of where I am on the technology continuum (for lack of a better term)… Attending Gnomedex is like cresting a hill and –for just a few minutes– I can see some of the smart kids way off on the horizon, running toward the future. I won’t catch them, but it’s nice to get a glimpse every now and then.” [More on the Gnomedex philosophy]

This is an easy conference to keep up with. This is the conference where I first heard about blogging, Twitter, social media and so much more that has become part of our lives. These are the geeks who come up with these little time munchers. I have no idea what I’ll learn this year but I’m all tingly with anticipation.

Shop Talk: SEC Digital Network

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The Southeastern Conference is getting ready to launch the SEC Digital Network. They’re working with a company called XOS Digital and are touting: “…nearly 10,000 hours of original and exclusive SEC content anytime, anywhere through online video syndication, digital downloads, and exclusive live-streaming and on-demand video content.”

If I understand this correctly, this does NOT include live streaming of actual game broadcasts. Those are protected by the rights holders. Companies like ours. So what content will be available?

  • Highlights
  • Complete game replays
  • Breaking SEC news in real-time
  • Post-game interviews
  • Tailgate events
  • Behind-the-scenes pep talks
  • Press conferences

The company I work for is associated with some SEC schools: Alabama, Mississippi State and South Carolina.

Remember that saying about the farmer’s pig? We eat everything but the oink? Well, companies like ours pay lots and lots of money for the marketing rights to this big schools and we have to sell everything but the oink to recover that investment.

But you can only put so many commercials in a radio or TV broadcast; only so many logos on a big scoreboard; only so many ads in a program (as you can see, I don’t really know everything we sell).

And if God isn’t making any more land, she’s not making any more avails in a football broadcast. So everyone is looking for ways to generate more programming, more content, to support additional advertising. The SEC Digital Network would seem to be doing this.

And the fans have a nearly insatiable appetite for anything related to their team. And if the SEC does this right, with lots of fan engagement and interaction, and fully mobile… they’ll have a winner.

A new website for under $60.00

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On Thursday of this past week one of our company websites “broke.” That’s my non-geek analysis. It wasn’t the first time and we knew it wouldn’t be the last, so –with the support and encouragement of our IT department– we decided to just flush it and start over.

At noon on Friday I installed a new WordPress theme ($59.95 from StudioPress) and started copying and pasting content. By four o’clock, I was pretty much done. Here’s a screen shot of the work-in-progress:

Learfield Communications is comprised of two operating divisions: Sports and News. We have a corporate website; a website for the sports division; one for the news division; and one for each of the networks that make up the news division.

The news division site was a challenge because we really didn’t have any dynamic content for the site and I hated putting up a “brochure” that never changed.

The WordPress site we tossed together in a few hours on Friday afternoon won’t win any awards but it will allow us to do things we couldn’t before. Like video. It’s becoming much easier to shoot, edit and host (yea YouTube and Vimeo!) video, so it makes sense to include it. WordPress has endless plug-ins for this task.

And WordPress is just a very good content management system, at least for our needs. I’ll be able to show folks in our marketing department how to create and update pages which makes it possible to keep the site fresh and current.

WordPress is very social-network friendly. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter… wherever you have content, you can quickly incorporate it.

The effectiveness of this –or any– website will be measured by the quantity and quality of the content and ease of interaction with the people who visit it. WordPress delivers.

It would have been easy to spend a couple of months a  few thousand dollars getting a simple site like this developed. I can now take that money and time and go improve some more of our sites. [END OF COMMERCIAL]

All I need is this bowling ball. And this ash tray.

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Steve Rubel lists five ways in which he is simplifying his technology:

  1. Eliminating any bookmarks, software/webware that I haven’t used in the last seven days
  2. Cutting back to two devices for everything – a laptop and a cell phone. Period, end of story
  3. All critical data seamlessly syncs between these two devices. If a service doesn’t allow me to sync stuff via the cloud and access it both online and off, it’s toast
  4. He’s dumped tons of of stuff: RSS feeds and virtually every email newsletter
  5. Setting up lists on Friendfeed to help me find signals in the noise

That sounds really good to me. I’m feeling more cluttered every day. Too many atoms, too many bytes (bits?)

  • #1 will be a snap for the bookmarks. I’ll have to nut up to kill some of the software I’m not using. Wish me luck.
  • #2 is equally appealing. I could get by with my MacBook and my iPhone. But the big iMac at work belongs to the company, so… and the Mac Mini at home really gets very little use.
  • #3 The whole Mac/Mobile Me experience has made me very reliant on sync’ing. I have a couple of apps that don’t but not many.
  • #4 is pretty easy to do. Got my RSS subscriptions under 50. If I add one, I’ll try to find one to delete
  • #5 I’ve never been able to get with the Friendfeed thing. I’ll take another look but…

“100% User-Controlled Radio”

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Later this month (28th), CBS Radio will debut “… the industry’s first 100 percent user-controlled, on-air radio program” Sunday nights on KITS-FM in San Francisco. The website is called Jelli. [ADWEEK]

“A far cry from the days of phone-in requests, Jelli gives listeners complete control, just as if they were in the station studio. Using Web-based, real-time voting and other features, listeners create the playlist, determining what is broadcast over the airwaves seconds before it plays. The community can even vote to pull a song off the air instantly.”

I think I agree with James at Podcasting News. Feels a little gimmicky. I wonder if OFF is one of the options.

You can change everything

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In a recent post, Seth Godin reminds us we are not really stuck in a rut. We can, in fact, change everything and then lists a bunch of ways to do that. Some of my favorites: Move to Thiland; Become a vegan; Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bath robe over their clothes.

But as one who spends most of his days (and nights) working on websites, this one really spoke to me:

“Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site”

Might be difficult to make this blog more simple. But some of our company websites could be a LOT leaner and cleaner. I’d love to flush ’em and start over as Seth suggests.

Good use of Web 2.0 tools by non-profit

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One of the clients we work with is Missouri Children’s Trust Fund. It’s a non-profit that works with “partners” throughout the state to try to prevent child abuse and neglect.

When we started working with them a couple of years ago, they had an awful website that took days or weeks to update. They trusted us enough to scrap it and move to a blog (a scary word back then). Since then they’ve become master of their digital domain.

Their annual conference is underway and Kirk Schreiber –the executive director– has been posting updates to Twitter and –with a little help– posting photos from his iPhone.

Yesterday he whipped out a tiny digital recorder and did an interview with one of the keynote speakers for an upcoming podcast.

CTF and Missouri KidsFirst –a companion organization– have very small staffs but they’ve tapped into these web tools to tell their stories and they’re doing it themselves, for little or no cost.

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?”

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In a post titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky provides some insight –and historical perspective– on what’s happening to newspapers. He starts with the question often asked by those committed to saving newspapers

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“When someone demands to be told how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

I think this is the first time I’ve fully understood that old models can be broken before new ones are there to take their place.